Thoughts on Mediatization

Conceptualizing Mediatization : using the framework of communicative theory to help establish a more comprehensive understanding

Establishing how we may possibly interpret 'mediatization' by delving into theoretical framework of constructive communication.

Quotes of interest:

Although the notion of mediatization lacks certainly an exact definition, it seems doubtlessly useful indicating some of the fundamental social transformations that have occurred in our lives in the last decades. Intuitively, the word seems to capture the changes that occur in our perceptions of the world and how we act in it. (297)

 On the one hand, mediatization refers to ‘‘a metaprocess of the change of media,’’ on the other hand, it is a ‘‘microprocess affecting human actors and their social relation’’ (Krotz, 2012, p. 36). (297)

Tomasello (2008) demonstrates that both lack what he calls ‘‘shared intentionality,’’ that is, ‘‘joint attention, joint intention, and communicative intention, we see humans’ cooperative motives for communication turn into mutual assumptions, and even norms of cooperation; and we see humans’ ‘natural’ communicative gestures turn into human communicative conventions’'.(304)

If mediatization is framed in terms of action theory, it must necessarily be related to the notion of mediation. As Hepp (2012a, 2012b) stresses, mediatization and mediation must not be considered in opposition. Rather, as I want to suggest, they can be considered as complementary features of communicative action. (307) 

As opposed to Latour’s view that networks of things and humans do the work in these centers (Latour & Hermant, 1998), this research shows that framing and contextualization is achieved not just by the actors but through the temporal coordination of actions, both human and technological, and their performance. Hence, Latour does not only neglect this kind of performative aspect of action, he also seems to miss the observation emphasized by the workplace studies that the sequence of actions (or the association of actors) is dependent on the knowledge of the actors and their interpretation. (309)

As opposed to these views, communicative constructivism considers objects and technologies as an integral part of communicative action which are intrinsically and meaningfully linked to the human actors via the pivotal role of the body. Seen from this perspective, the proliferation of objects and technologies does not reduce sociality. Rather sociality can be seen to be enforced or enlarged by mediatization in all its aspects, so as to increase the importance of communicative action. The inclusion of new technologies into communicative action does not only allow for new medialized forms of communicative action, including a massive expansion of visualization and the secondary sensualization of the life world (Krotz, 2001). The current form of mediatization, based on digital technologies of communication, legitimated since the 1960s by a huge range of privately and state financed programs to create the information society, dissolves knowledge (‘‘stored’’ in subjective consciousness) into communicative action and increases the frequency, performance and speed of communicative action to such an extent that one may dare to diagnose a profound transformation into ‘‘a culture of communication for the sake of communication’’ (Castells, 2009, p. 38) in which more and more knowledge is transformed into communicative forms. (311)

The idea that meaning is an active accomplishment of subjective consciousness (which, one must stress, should not be misunderstood, as often happens in superficial receptions of Schutz, as ‘‘cognitivist’’). Whereas Husserl had assumed that subjectively constituted meaning becomes social by another subjective act, that is, as ‘‘transcendental intersubjectivity’’(300)

Classical Marxist ‘‘production paradigm’’ (which, in his view, reduces action to the production of objects), there is another more basic problem inherent in his notion of communicative action—namely, the distinction between instrumental and communicative action that builds an artificial wall between two sides of the same coin.  (301)

The problem with this distinction becomes particularly pertinent in the harsh duality of his ‘‘doctrine of the two realms,’’ that is, the separation between the ‘‘sociocultural life world’’ (constituted by communicative action and guided by ‘‘communicative rationality’’), and the ‘‘system’’ (constituted by strategic and teleological action which is guided by instrumental rationality). (302)

While semiotics and structuralism stressed the role of the material character of objectivations as the grounds for their ‘‘structure,’’ pragmatism stressed

the fact that objectivation is embedded in action. This becomes particularly evident in bodily expressions, that is, if objectivations are nothing but temporally fleeting forms of communicative action.

The duality of objectivation, referring both to objects ‘‘produced’’ by actions and to the ‘‘production’’ of objectivations, is neither an accident nor a mystery. While Habermas accounts for the way in which communicative actions ‘‘produce’’ objects in such a way as to allow the process to be reconstructed using instrumental rationality, the role of the body in communicative action is largely ignore  (302)

Communicative action is action embodied in time in such a way that the body not only ‘‘affects’’ something in its working acts but also allows sensory perception and experience of these very acts of working during their performance. (303)

It is the temporal course of embodied action, that is, its ‘‘sequentiality,’’ that is, therefore, the basis for social order. (303)

Consider all these forms of action to have been acquired by processes of consciousness such as sedimentation, routinization, and habitualization (303)

Material objectivations which carry the marks of actors, that is, ‘‘cultural products,’’ objects, and technologies, are one way to stabilize objectivations, and, consequently, also communicative actions. For this reason they are also reference points in the discussion of mediatization to which I shall refer later. Before this, I should at least hint at the most important presupposition in the stabilization of communicative action into communicative forms which construct the social order. (305)

I want to approach mediatization on the basis of the notion communicative action, as outlined above, and determine it with particular respect to the notion of mediation and medialization. In doing so, I essentially agree with Krotz (2001, p. 23) that the ‘‘starting point [of the analysis of mediatization] must be communication or communicative action.’’ (307)

They draw a distinction between ‘‘immediate’’ forms of social action and ‘‘mediated’’ forms as basic dimensions of social action (cf. Gebhardt, 2008) (308)

 In the study of communication media, have stressed that technologies of mediation allow us to cross the ‘‘orbits’’ and enter into the face-to-face situation. Thus Thompson (1994), Ho ̈flich (2005) and Krotz (2001) suggest a mixed form of interpersonal mediated interaction which accounts for the massive ‘‘penetration’’ of communication technologies into face- to-face interaction and their ‘‘domestication’’ (Lundby, 2009). Within the sociology of technology, this intersection of social action with technology has been said to cause a differentiation of actions and the creation of a form of social action through technologies called ‘‘interactivity’’ (Rammert, 2012). Probably the most radical reaction to the mediating role of technologies has been formulated by Latour as part of the ‘‘Actor Network Theory.’’ His radicalism is not only due to the fact that he accepts technologies as ‘‘actors’’ in the same (‘‘symmetrical’’) sense as human actors. He also allows us to address the question of the role of ‘‘objectivations,’’ which lies at the core of the theory proposed here.9 (308)

Mediators belong to the category of actors who link the ‘local’ and ‘translocal’ or the ‘situational’ and the ‘extrasituational.’ (308)

The body figures as the crucial reference point for mediatization, with respect to both experience and active conduct. Mediatization thus refers to the fact that media are not just ‘‘extensions of our

sensory apparatus’’ (Meyrowitz, 1994, p. 58) but also extensions of actions (how does opera industry deal with this? extension of sensory apparatus) (309)

Moreover, they allow to reconcile the two diverging dimensions of mediatization mentioned in the introduction. On the one hand, they locate mediatization as a fundamental feature of social life, that is, communicative action. In this respect, they closely relate the analysis of media and technology to human actors and their perspective. On the other hand, they delineate mediatization as an encompassing ‘‘meta process’’ constructed by communicative actions. In disregarding the distinction between micro and macrolevel or situation and structures as an ontological fact, mediatization becomes a crucial aspect of analysis, particularly in contemporary society.

If one asks why mediatization became so important in ‘‘mediatized modernity’’ (Lash in Lundby, 2009), one cannot escape the role of interactivity. Interactivity is most often identified as the exchange of behavioral sequences between human actors and technologies. As clearly as the observation of these sequences focuses on the body, it typically neglects the very forms of communicative action which are performed in these sequences. (310)

As the electronic mass media seem to make social spheres ‘‘more permeable’’ (Meyrowitz, 1994, p. 67), the increasingly multimodal interactivity fostered by digital technology is one of the most salient features of mediatization in contemporary society. It results in the transgression of what used to be the ‘‘primacy of the face-to-face situation.’’ This includes several aspects: transgression between the local and the global, transgression of social structure and interaction order and, closer to the discussion of mediatization, the transgression (or dissolution of the distinction between) of immediate and mediated social situations which turn into ‘‘scopic’’ situations.10 Mediatization, however, does not only mean that the structure of coordinating communicative actions is changing, as the notion of interactivity suggests. The transgression also results in the transformation and creation of communicative forms, patterns and genres, such as computer games, messages on answering machines and powerpoint presentations, to name but a few. In this way, it contributes to the transformation of the communicative cultures of contemporary society.

The transgression of the face-to-face situation is not a totally new phenomenon. However, the fact that communicative action can increasingly be performed in a translocal common environment inherently decreases the relevance of localized social relations and affects what is called community, the public and public communication and even presence that turns or ‘‘liveness’’ (Auslander, 1999; Couldry, 2008b). Some authors argue that mediatization results in the increased importance of objects and, therefore, postsociality. According to Knorr Cetina (2001), for example, postsociality is due to the insertion of objects into the ‘social.’ Also Latour (2005) assumes that sociality must be extended to ‘‘interobjectivity’’ in order to incorporate ‘‘object. (310) 

Knoblauch, Hubert. "Communicative constructivism and mediatization."Communication Theory 23.3 (2013): 297-315.

INTERPRETING ETHNOGRAPHY 

I've recently been attempting to come to grips / or gaining an understanding of ethnomusicology. I'm hoping that gaining an insight into ethnographic practices will help me establish a suitable and legitimate framework for engaging with, and ultimately understanding how 'Live Streamed Opera' (cinema) audiences, well... work.  

Some quotes of interest: 

‘Because of the potential for truly participatory participant- observation through actively joining in a society’s ‘music culture’ (sounds, concepts, social interactions, materials, a society’s total involvement with music), we believe ethnomusicologists are well positioned to offer unique perspectives on postmodern fieldwork processes for all ethnographic disciplines. By ethnography, we mean the observation and description (or representation) of culture (ethnomusicologists = music culture). Fieldwork is the observational and experiential portion of the ethnographic process during which the ethnomusicologist engages living individuals in order to learn about music-culture. Participation for the musician, however, offers insight and introduces new problems. The researcher may also engage physical documents of a culture in an archive or on site in the spatial location of research interest (secondary technique). (Pg: 4)

(Un)doing fieldwork: ‘In the ethnography of musical performance we are particularly challenged, as writers, to present and represent the experiential since performance is experience… one might argue that all ethnography be considered ethnography of performance , since culture itself is at some level inevitably enacted. But the relative specificity of music, while always embedded in and enabled by other performance modes, can provide a heightened example of performance processes. (Pg: 23) 

‘Ethnography, like any creative enterprise, is a representation, re-formation of experience, and we need to develop tools that help us sense when and what to include when representing a part of life - of our lives. (Pg: 24)

‘An ethnography of performance is in itself a meta-performance, requiring all the care, honesty, and detail that the subject matter - people and their expressive lives -demands. A focus on experience also helps ensure that we as ethnographers explain both the entryways and the barriers to knowing. Being explicit about what one could not come to know, and why, can often be more useful than ostensibly unsullied cultural information. (Pg: 33) 

‘Another argument in favour of experience brought to the forefront by the ethnography of performance is that research is to a great extent particularised by time, place, personality, and social circumstance. One of the most common errors in conventional ethnography is the tendency to generalise into theory based on experiences particular to a certain interpretive situation. The focus on experience helps us to situate readers within the fluctuations and particularities of performative circumstances. This leads us to the task of writing about performance in a way that evokes this immediacy and particularity; that means finding ways to capture what we’ve learned via our senses, our bodies. We must make our writing specific enough to convey in detail the social and technical aesthetics of a group or style, and perhaps most important, to evoke the meaning of a performed moment’. (Pg: 33)

‘Phenomenology emphasises the immediate, concrete, sensory lifeworld and it attempts to ground knowledge in the world of lived experience’. (Pg: 90)

‘Through common intersubjective experience we enter the worlds of interpretation… interpretation turns being into meaning. (Pg: 94)

Barz, Gregory F., and Timothy J. Cooley, eds. Shadows in the field: new perspectives for fieldwork in ethnomusicology. Oxford University Press, 2008.

 Thoughts on 

and iNTERPRETATIONS OF mediatization

'Although the notion of mediatization lacks certainly an exact definition, it seems doubtlessly useful indicating some of the fundamental social transformations that have occurred in our lives in the last decades. Intuitively, the word seems to capture the changes that occur in our perceptions of the world and how we act in it. However, there is quite substantial disagreement as to what the word may mean in theoretical terms and in terms of empirical research. The disagreement is not so much routed in the lack of definition or ambiguity of definition but rather in the lack of a theoretical framework in which the two most divergent aspects of its meaning can be understood. On the one hand, mediatization refers to ‘‘a metaprocess of the change of media,’’ on the other hand, it is a ‘‘microprocess affecting human actors and their social relation’’ (Krotz, 2012, p. 36).'


'By redefining communicative action as the basic process in the social construction of reality, this approach is built on a convergence of various theoretical strands relevant to the analysis of communication in contemporary society.'


'Before we consider the social order that emerges from sequentiality, one should be aware of an important consequence that arises from conceiving of communicative action as embodied action. Since any such interpretation of action is essentially linked to the body, it defies any distinction between behavior as a ‘‘meaningless’’ performance from a biological body and ‘‘action’’ as an ‘‘intentional’’ act of the bodyless mind. This statement seems daring, yet if we accept that our notion of beauty, gender, or health is socially constructed, the logical consequence is to assume that our body’s performance is meaningful. In this sense one could compare communicative action to what Schatzki (1996) calls ‘‘social practices’’ (including ‘‘doings’’ and ‘‘sayings’’). However, though practice theory considers these practices as ‘‘subconscious,’’ communicative constructivism considers them as a form of knowledge which has to be acquired by, and depends on, activities of subjective consciousness. Thus, if we walk or wander, read letters or play soccer, we may consider all these forms of action to have been acquired by processes of consciousness such as sedimentation, routinization, and habitualization.'


'If one asks why mediatization became so important in ‘‘mediatized modernity’’ (Lash in Lundby, 2009), one cannot escape the role of interactivity. Interactivity is most often identified as the exchange of behavioral sequences between human actors and technologies. As clearly as the observation of these sequences focuses on the body, it typically neglects the very forms of communicative action which are performed in these sequences.'


'A series of authors, particularly involved in the study of communication media, have stressed that technologies of mediation allow us to cross the ‘‘orbits’’ and enter into the face-to-face situation. Thus Thompson (1994), Ho ̈flich (2005) and Krotz (2001) suggest a mixed form of interpersonal mediated interaction which accounts for the massive ‘‘penetration’’ of communication technologies into face- to-face interaction and their ‘‘domestication’’ (Lundby, 2009). Within the sociology of technology, this intersection of social action with technology has been said to cause a differentiation of actions and the creation of a form of social action through technologies called ‘‘interactivity’’ (Rammert, 2012). Probably the most radical reaction to the mediating role of technologies has been formulated by Latour as part of the ‘‘Actor Network Theory.’’ His radicalism is not only due to the fact that he accepts technologies as ‘‘actors’’ in the same (‘‘symmetrical’’) sense as human actors. He also allows us to address the question of the role of ‘‘objectivations,’’ which lies at the core of the theory proposed here.'


'Latour emphasizes the idea that society is not only built on human actors but on the relations between varied kinds of actors, including technologies and objects. Actors are linked by networks which can be condensed into black boxes so as to incorporate these actors in a way which he calls ‘‘powerful.’’ Networks of actors seem quite a useful concept since they allow Latour to account for the relevance of things to actions. By relating to networks of actors, Latour also intends to overcome the primacy of the ‘‘local’’ face-to-face interaction. It is at this precise moment that Latour (2005) introduced ‘‘mediation’’ or, to be more exact, ‘‘mediators.’’ Mediators belong to the category of actors who link the ‘local’ and ‘translocal’ or the ‘situational’ and the ‘extrasituational.’ Latour argues that the ‘local’ has no primacy over the ‘translocal’ nor is the face-to-face situation more ‘‘real’’ than situations of mediated interaction. Rather, it is the association of certain objects which allows the production of a certain locality. Thus, mediators are objects which relate specific situations to the global context (such as centers of calculations, stock markets or panoramas). They are the ‘‘means of transportation’’ by which different contexts are brought together.'


'Latour refers directly to the ‘‘panorama’’ (Latour, 2005, p. 300ff). The panorama is a way in which society is produced as something that appears to supersede the situation. Latour rightly observes that panoramas serve to ‘‘frame’’ and ‘‘contextualize’’ what actors do. This view is in common with the empirical research performed on a notable example of a panorama which Suchman (1993) calls a center of coordination.'


'Mediatization combines both, mediation and medialization. In this way, mediatization includes the interpretation of mediators as meanings and messages. From the point of view of communicative action, technologies, be they designed for communication or not, are not just ‘‘instruments’’ interposed into communicative action. Neither can they be accounted for simply by the notion of practice. Instead they require, as we have seen, interpretations, which Pinch (2008) rightly stresses, interpretations which, one has to add, are themselves part of communicative actions.
In summary, mediatization is a general feature of communicative action. It involves meaningful bodies and objects in action. The body figures as the crucial reference point for mediatization, with respect to both experience and active conduct. Mediatization thus refers to the fact that media are not just ‘‘extensions of our sensory apparatus’’ (Meyrowitz, 1994, p. 58) but also extensions of actions. While mediatization is a general feature of communicative action, it is the forms of communication or, as Thompson (1994) prefers, the patterns of communication and interaction which are subject to change. The study of mediatization is, therefore, the study of the changing structure of communicative action.'


'If one asks why mediatization became so important in ‘‘mediatized modernity’’ (Lash in Lundby, 2009), one cannot escape the role of interactivity. Interactivity is most often identified as the exchange of behavioral sequences between human actors and technologies. As clearly as the observation of these sequences focuses on the body, it typically neglects the very forms of communicative action which are performed in these sequences.'


'As the electronic mass media seem to make social spheres ‘‘more permeable’’ (Meyrowitz, 1994, p. 67), the increasingly multimodal interactivity fostered by digital technology is one of the most salient features of mediatization in contemporary society. It results in the transgression of what used to be the ‘‘primacy of the face-to-face situation.’’ This includes several aspects: transgression between the local and the global, transgression of social structure and interaction order and, closer to the discussion of mediatization, the transgression (or dissolution of the distinction between) of immediate and mediated social situations which turn into ‘‘scopic’’ situations. Mediatization, however, does not only mean that the structure of coordinating communicative actions is changing, as the notion of interactivity suggests... contributing to the transformation of the communicative cultures of contemporary society.'


'The fact that communicative action can increasingly be performed in a translocal common environment inherently decreases the relevance of localized social relations and affects what is called community, the public and public communication and even presence that turns or ‘‘liveness’’ (Auslander, 1999; Couldry, 2008b). Some authors argue that mediatization results in the increased importance of objects and, therefore, postsociality. According to Knorr Cetina (2001), for example, postsociality is due to the insertion of objects into the ‘social.’ Also Latour (2005) assumes that sociality must be extended to ‘‘interobjectivity’’ in order to incorporate ‘‘objects’’ as actors in their own right.'

'Sociality can be seen to be enforced or enlarged by mediatization in all its aspects, so as to increase the importance of communicative action.'


'The inclusion of new technologies into communicative action does not only allow for new medialized forms of communicative action, including a massive expansion of visualization and the secondary sensualization of the life world (Krotz, 2001).'


'The current form of mediatization, based on digital technologies of communication, legitimated since the 1960s by a huge range of privately and state financed programs to create the information society, dissolves knowledge (‘‘stored’’ in subjective consciousness) into communicative action and increases the frequency, performance and speed of communicative action to such an extent that one may dare to diagnose a profound transformation into ‘‘a culture of communication for the sake of communication’’ (Castells, 2009, p. 38) in which more and more knowledge is transformed into communicative forms.'



Knoblauch, Hubert. "Communicative constructivism and mediatization." Communication Theory 23.3 (2013): 297-315.

#QuoteAllOfTheThings

 audience interaction

With live-screening on social media platforms such as YouTube - virtual audiences members from around the globe are free to interact with fellow online spectators - exchanging opinions, insights, and critiquing both the broadcast and the production. 

Intermission Interviews

The intermission is used to advertise the opera house's various artistic programmes, their current productions, and to immerse the audience in the background of both the production and performance.

 In the screenshots above, we can see interviews being conducted inside the institutional walls (backstage) and in the midst of the live-screen audience with the costume department.